from the this-is-unfortunate dept

Back in February we wrote about an absolutely horrible ruling out of a New York court by Judge Katherine Forrest that argued embedding an infringing tweet could be an act of infringement on its own. As we pointed out, if this ruling holds, it would undermine some of the basis of how the internet itself works. The issue here gets a bit into the weeds of both how the internet and how copyright law works. Embedding something on the internet, at a technical level, is really no different than how linking on the internet works. And it's long been established that if you link to infringing content, that alone should not be considered a separate act of infringement. But is embedding? At a very basic level, this is the difference between the two:

Everyone agrees that the first one is not infringing by itself (the original site hosting it, or the person who uploaded it, may be infringing, but not the person linking to it). Most courts have used the "server test" on this question, saying that if you merely embedded the image, a la what's above, it's not infringing for the person who used the embed code. This makes sense for a fairly important reason: if you use an embed code on your site, you never actually have the image on your site. Even if it appears on the site, that is merely because the end user's browser pulls that image in and displays it -- which is exactly how the web was designed to work, with the ability to pull in content from many different places and show it all together.

But Judge Forrest decided to throw everyone for a loop and toss that whole idea out the window:

The Court declines defendants’ invitation to apply Perfect 10’s Server Test for two reasons. First, this Court is skeptical that Perfect 10 correctly interprets the display right of the Copyright Act. As stated above, this Court finds no indication in the text or legislative history of the Act that possessing a copy of an infringing image is a prerequisite to displaying it...

Perhaps more troubling is that Forrest cited the silly Aereo "looks like a duck" test to argue that even though it's technically no different than linking, and even though the defendants in this case don't actually host or distribute the image, because it looks like they are hosting it, they can be liable for infringing the display right.

In this particular case, photographer Justin Goldman sued a bunch of media sites for embedding a photo that others had uploaded to Twitter (Goldman had originally posted it to Snapchat, and someone else took it to Reddit, where someone else brought it to Twitter). A bunch of media sites then embedded the tweet, and Goldman sued them all more or less, even though such embeds that show the associated media are a key feature of Twitter.

Judge Forrest allowed the defendants to do an interlocutory appeal, which basically puts the rest of the case on hold to allow a certain part of the case to be appealed to make sure the district court got it right. Interlocutory appeals aren't always allowed and some courts don't really like them very much. In this case, Judge Forrest allowed it to go up to the 2nd Circuit appeals court, but that court has said it won't review the ruling... for now.

Depending on where you stand this may or may not be a good thing. The case now moves back to the lower court (though, potentially with a different judge as Forrest just announced she's leaving the bench at some point "later this year."). It may go to trial, or the remaining defendants may decide to just settle the case and not have to deal with it. If the case does move forward, there are other potential reasons why Goldman may have difficulty winning, including the lack of actual knowledge of infringement by the publishers embedding the tweets.

In either of those situations, Forrest's odd decision is then rendered less impactful. Since it's in the district court, it has no direct precedential value on other cases (though can be cited). And that's at least preferable to the 2nd Circuit blessing Forrest's dismissal of the server test... though not as good as if the 2nd Circuit decides to bless the server test. It's also possible that the issue could come up on appeal later (i.e., not as an interlocutory appeal, but after the case reaches a conclusion in the lower court). Either way, this case is still a bit of a mess, and is yet another example of how bad the law is at dealing with technology.

does the Internet need a replacement?

As we pointed out, if this ruling holds, it would undermine some of the basis of how the internet itself works.

Just to play devil's advocate, has anyone here really investigated the idea that maybe the Internet (as currently implemented) should be changed?

I mean the only constant thing in this world is that change will happen. Now, I personally feel that the Internet is implemented good enough for what it allows us to do today. And any changes that restrict the free flow of information should be avoided.

Originally it was designed to be an information sharing and communication device that could withstand disruption from external attacks. But the creators also assumed all users were trustworthy. Which is why we have had and will continue to have a lot of security issues. Over the years the Internet has adapted many times, which is why it is so prevalent in our society today.

But do the protocols, routing, hosting, and/or infrastructure maybe need tweaking or replacing so that issues like copyright, information ownership, privacy controls, and anonymity could be better executed?

I realize my definition of better isn't the same as everyone else but maybe others have some good ideas they can share.

Re: does the Internet need a replacement?

The Internet, as it currently functions, is a whole bunch of stuff bolted onto the frame works of Hyper-Text-Transfer-Protocol, which was really not designed for what it's used for these days - which is partially responsible for the overall slowness of web-based stuff.

It's no doubt possible to create and even implement, in some cases, something better suited to the modern internet than HTTP, but there are numerous hurdles to overcome.

Even before we get to the problem of who we could trust to actually do such an undertaking, there's the issue of adoption. The thing we love about the internet is that it is in many ways decentralized, but that also is an obstacle to replacement - you have to get a whole bunch of various people and organizations (like Google, or Facebook) on board with switching to the new underpinning protocol, so you have to convince them that the benefits of doing so will outweigh the cost of doing so. That is never going to be easy.

The most likely path forward that I can see is for the new protocol to have compatibility of communication with the old protocol. That way it could be implemented piece bye piece without breaking what already exists. Ideally, if the new protocol is significantly better, then the gradual switch will occur as people and businesses become aware of the advantages and start buying in, because it's just that helpful.

If that's possible, it might just happen - of course, Hurdle 1 is coming up with the protocol in the first place. With the world the way it is currently, no one company or organization should be solely responsible - the only way I'd trust a new protocol is if it was open source, and no one owned it, much like no one owns HTTP.

Re: Re: does the Internet need a replacement?

Display right and embedding

Author of a web page is responsible of _all_ the content that is visible in the page. This is called editorial responsibility. Every content items, including text, images, videos, animations, 3d graphics or page layout needs to be checked for copyright problems before publishing the page. Author of the page and publisher of the page are jointly responsible for ensuring that all items displayed in the page have been properly licensed. If it displays jpg files, those photos need to be snapped by the authors of the page, or they need to have license agreements in place for publishing the material.

This is why embedding is different from linking. Embedding displays the content. Linking does not display the content, only allows access via clicking.

Law uses per-page authorship division. Each page has certain responsible persons or authors who take the blame if copyright infringement material is included in the page.

This works well in articles and information content, and thus suitable for the web.

Re: Re: Display right and embedding

> Content in a embedded link is NOT on your page, it's at best a window to the other persons page.

You have to think this as old fashioned newspaper, where they run printing press in the publish operation. In this situation, "window to other person's page" is just not available, instead everything included to the same page will eat part of your ink and the author of the page is responsible of all the content that takes ink.

While this analogue is outdated, and might not be understood in the future, there simply isn't any "window to someone elses page" or anything like that. The pages stand alone -- you're responsible of _all_ the content included in the page, including embedded stuff.

Copyright has no provisions for consumer confusion. It doesn't matter if the viewer of the page thinks an embed is a copy, because it isn't. No copy was made, no infringement.

As far as the display right goes, it is possible for any website to limit its images so that they cannot be embedded on another site. Thus it can be argued that if an image can be embedded, permission to do so is implied.

The chutzpah of Mansick and ACs to just contradict a judge!

One of the most astonishing aspects of Techdirt is that no matter how many times courts contradict his assertions (esp on copyright), all the way up to SC, Masnick just goes blithely on without taking least heed except to also assert that he knows more than judges and they're doin' it all wrong.

It's an unblemished 20-year record since Napster of just refusing to learn. And literally psychotic, here's the def: psychosis = a major mental disorder in which the personality is very seriously disorganized and contact with reality is usually impaired.

Salient comment from prior piece which was of course censored:

Actually, teh whole internets may not be workable. It's again rights in conflict, and again, I say that (in the US), Constitution is explicit, where "embedding" results in too-close a likeness of ducks.

BUT I'm not going to get exercised over this complex tangle at present stage. Judge may well be thinking this needs decided and expecting how will go -- which may be to MY displeasure when goes wrong -- OR to yours if rightly decided.

===
Heh, heh. I'm censored precisely because so often right! -- And turned out the displeasure is YOURS, Masnick! WRONG YET AGAIN!

Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

> I am not the "author" of something I embed, any more than your local bar is the author of what is playing on the TV screen.

In our world, everyone who watches tv or owns a tv, needs a permission to do so, and need to pay for the priviledge. The placement of the tv inside the local bar determines that the bar is responsible of tv and needs to obtain a permission for the tv broadcasts. If the bar fails to do so, they can be fined.

Same way, if you embed content to your page, you need to obtain permission from the original author.

Make it personal to make the point

If the judge wants to claim that if the 'original' item is infringing embedding it makes the one doing so also liable as though they'd infringed directly, then great, they can show their conviction and be shown (one of) the problem with that by embedding a picture into a page under their control where the source material can be changed by anyone, and they are held liable for whatever it is.

I suspect that, using their logic on liability regarding embedding and a prosecutor and judge willing to go after one of their own they'd be in jail within a week if not sooner.

Re:

Interesting.Your comment was just as valuable (or valueless) as anything on Twitter and it falls within their current character limit (280 nowadays, not 140). It also doesn't include an embedded image, which is the issue under discussion, not the text.

Re: Re: does the Internet need a replacement?

Exactly. There's constant discussion of how to change the internet. But, these take the form of "we're struggling with IPv4 address layouts, how do we get people to move to IPv6" and "the original protocols aren't suited to modern purposes or are far too insecure, how do we replace/improve them".

Those are the discussions that should and are being had. We should not be having the "we need to make it less possible to protect yourself online because authorities want to track you every move" and "we need to hold 3rd parties responsible for things they didn't do" discussions, which are rightly opposed.

Re: Re: does the Internet need a replacement?

"The Internet, as it currently functions, is a whole bunch of stuff bolted onto the frame works of Hyper-Text-Transfer-Protocol"

Erm, you have that backwards. HTTP is an application layer protocol bolted on top of TCP/IP and various other lower level protocols, and the internet does consist of a lot more stuff than HTTP traffic at the application layer.

It's true that some things are dated and need to be vastly modernised, but there's a lot more involved than you appear to have seen.

"If that's possible, it might just happen - of course, Hurdle 1 is coming up with the protocol in the first place"

If you think that "a protocol" is all that's needed, you really need to educate yourself as to how everything actually works. There are many flaws in the system, and you'd have to fix problems with the protocols that actually drive the traffic and underlying requirements before you address any with the content that runs on them.

The things that are actually most important are standards and getting vendors to stick to those standards, and that's always an uphill battle. Especially with contentious issues like getting DRM into HTML5. Even if you were correct that it would take a single new protocol to fix everything, it would be complicated. In the real world, we can't even get people to agree that IPv6 is the best solution to the problems IPv4 has created, let alone switch to it.

Re: "Everyone agrees"?

I know the place. It's called Earth, located in the Milky Way galaxy, third planet from the sun. You're welcome any time.

"Search engines remove links from their results, based on legal threats"

Yes. Which are often proven to be false, or even demanding to take down material that the requester actually owns themselves. Actually committing perjury while doing so, but since this is never acted upon, they feel free to send false notices all the time.

Also note: you said "threat". Not "court order", not "obligated by law" but threats. Giving in to a threat does not mean that there was any guilt involved, it just means it's easier to back off than try to fight. If you threaten to punch me unless I give you my pencil and I give it to you, that doesn't mean that it was wrong for me to have the pencil, it only means I decided avoiding a punch was worth more than keeping the pencil.

In some areas, this is correctly called "extortion", or even "theft", but apparently all is OK so long as major corporation does it in your eyes.

"Why would they be doing that, sometimes giving copies of the takedown notices, if linking were so obviously legal?"

Because they're sent by automated bots, and it's far easier to take down everything and sift through complaints of legal content being taken down than to fight in court over each individual notice.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

That's all we need to know about this asshole. Not having done something is no defence for punishment. Suspicion is guilt, report to the nearest internment camp.

No wonder you can't get it through your head that YouTube should not be held responsible for things they didn't do, you're just to punish everybody regardless. It's sad, but bitter failures like you do end to go down that route.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

"In our world, everyone who watches tv or owns a tv, needs a permission to do so, and need to pay for the priviledge."

Cool. In OUR world, the one inhabited by people outside of your head, you need to do no such thing for many types of TV broadcast. Many are available free of charge, and even the ones you pay for have permission to play in multiple places for the one payment.

"If the bar fails to do so, they can be fined."

....and if they do you want them fined anyway. We know.

Enjoy your fantasy mansion for creating shitty websites that you so wish for, the rest of us will be opposing your attempts to rob the rest of us to provide a real one, and you are going to lose that battle.

Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

Everything hurts the middleman if you're going to use them as a handy target instead of going after people actually responsible for the actions in question - and they're always going to be an easier target. That's why protections for neutral platforms are so vital.

While in-line linking and framing may cause some computer users to believe they are viewing a single Google webpage, the Copyright Act, unlike the Trademark Act, does not protect a copyright holder against acts that cause consumer confusion

and the 7th Circuit, Flava Works v. Gunter found that embedding an infringing copy of a video was not itself infringing. It seems unlikely that embedding the original content would be found infringing in the 7th if embedding an infringing copy wasn't.

So that's two circuits that say this issue isn't infringement, and one judge from a lower level court that says it is. It's not strong support for your position.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

"Happily I have enough my own content that I don't need to embed other people's content at all. I can just choose one of my own articles and animations."

Sadly, your lack of talent and imagination is reflected in those, which is why your website is a failure. You could at least have chosen to decent CC licensed or public domain content to showcase your software rather than your own below mediocre efforts.

"embed tag is pretty useful for my own content"

So, you do depend on someone else's work, unless you're claiming to have invented that tag.

"coming from my own web area/server"

I'd be willing to take bets on how much open source software (i.e. "someone else's work you didn't pay for" that all consists of, you hypocrite.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

>Sadly, your lack of talent and imagination is reflected in those, which is why your website is a failure.

This is exactly why I get stuff done. I don't care if your content-evaluation-logic assigns poor results to my content. You never managed to create anything yourself, so your evaluation means nothing.

> You could at least have chosen to decent CC licensed or public domain content

It's better to create it yourself, so that you have the ownership, and don't need to ask for permission for every bit of operation you want to do.

Isn't this what you always want? Avoid asking permission from the content owners. Guess what, you can get that done, only if you create the content yourself. Since this solution solves your most important problem, why is creating it yourself not acceptable?

> to showcase your software rather than your own below mediocre efforts.

These below mediocre efforts are the best that the software can handle. Obviously the software implementation have some limits which break your solution miserably. Basically if you download megabytes of crap from the network, the loading time will grow so large that it is next to unusable. Before you complain about poor quality software, I can remind you that it's the most efficient solution available, i.e. it loads multiple content items in concurrent manner, using fastest possible web technology. Still the megabytes of crap loaded will kill the load time.

The load time problem is not present if you carefully design the content yourself -- without loading megabytes of mesh files from the network, but instead generating the mesh on runtime via code in procedural content generation approach. Such efficient content just isn't available on the net, since standard file formats are not in popular use, and thus creating the stuff yourself is the best bet.

So your evaluation failed to notice important features from the solution.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

"This is exactly why I get stuff done"

What do you get "done" exactly? The software and website you built doesn't seem to have improved at all in the time you've been writing here, your GitHub link doesn't even work, you've mentioned no other projects and you detailed a long time ago about how you essentially abandoned marketing your site after choosing the most expensive and least effective possible method.

What is the "stuff" you get "done"?

"You never managed to create anything yourself"

Ah, another asshole who has to lie about me or create a strawman to have a point. Fuck off.

"Avoid asking permission from the content owners"

CC licensed and public domain content has permission already granted, you moron. That's the entire point - you don't have to ask permission because the author has already said everybody can have it without asking.

"These below mediocre efforts are the best that the software can handle"

Lol, so your software isn't good enough to handle decent quality content? This is something you wish to boast about too?

"Basically if you download megabytes of crap from the network"

Megabytes? That's what it takes to congest your network? Is that who your content looks like it was rendered on an Amiga 500 in the early 90s, because your understanding of technology is stuck there?

Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

> it's far easier to take down everything and sift through complaints of legal content being taken down

This just means that their web page is just too large for these people to handle. They either need to get a larger team and reserve few people to handle the takedowns, or they need to reduce the amount of content that they are publishing.

Usually publishing content requires that you first create that content yourself. If they fail in that test, it is no wonder they have problems with handling the takedowns. If they let other players in the market to create significant amount of content for their platform, they should have enough resources to sift through some takedown requests, when their authors forgot to follow copyrights.

Basically these people are saving tons of effort when they didn't create the content themselves, but then they still don't have enough resources to check the content for copyright problems even after content owners have clearly identified the problem areas.

Basically their organisation is way too small to handle the flood of content their system is getting. Maybe they should beg for money from their user base, so that they could hire few more people?

Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

"This just means that their web page is just too large for these people to handle"

Most major websites are, which is where software comes into play. For a self-proclaimed software developer, you should have at least a basic understanding of that.

"Usually publishing content requires that you first create that content yourself."

Hahahahahaha.... You've said some fucking stupid stuff in your time here, but that is really one of the best. So, everyone has to self publish and licensing doesn't exist now?

"Basically these people are saving tons of effort when they didn't create the content themselves"

No, they are putting in a HUGE amount of effort crating a PLATFORM for OTHER PEOPLE to use to publish THEIR OWN content.

"Maybe they should beg for money from their user base, so that they could hire few more people?"

User base base such as the major record labels who have moved there to get more money from them than they could from their own site.

Just when you think you've read the most moronic posts you can in a morning, here you excel yourself yet again. Tell me, is the reason you spend so much time spouting stupidity here because this free service you utilise doesn't try to compile what you type first? Maybe that's why you're so frustrated, you haven't managed to build a working piece of code for years without having to copy and paste someone else's work.

"Are you thinking that not only it needs to be developed 24/7, it also needs to be updated every 2 minutes?"

No, I'm saying that you've been spewing bullshit on here for months and your main product doesn't appear to have changed in the slightest and you've not linked to any new projects.

Since your entire argument is that you should be paid according to the amount of hours you put into creating, what have you been creating during those hours?

"It works, you simply don't have access rights to the source code."

So, why put a link to it on a public page if you're going to hide the content from everybody?

"Everyone does not need to accept their license even if they offer it to the whole world."

So, licences are optional now? Nobody has to accept the standard copyright licence if they don't agree with it, or does it only apply to those that undermine your entire thought process when applied to the real world?

"No, it just takes too long time to load. It doesnt congest the network, but takes too long time to load."

Are you on 33.6k or 56k dialup? Or, more likely, is it your shitty code that's not able to parse the data efficiently?

"Amiga 500 had significantly better working technology than what the current systems are able to handle."

Name one piece of software where this is true. Just one.

(Hint: you can actually build an Amiga emulator using a Raspberry Pi that runs faster than the original hardware)

> So, why put a link to it on a public page if you're going to hide the content from everybody?

Well, most people never bother to click the link. Also I use that same link to access the page, with proper access rights.

> > "Everyone does not need to accept their license even if they offer it to the whole world."

> Nobody has to accept the standard copyright licence if they don't agree with it

Usually the reason to reject a license is because the cost is too high. If they don't even bother to collect money from the user of their product, they probably don't bother to pay salary to the people who created the content. i.E. they're using unpaid slaves to do the work, so the cost is too high.

Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

> > "Basically these people are saving tons of effort when they didn't create the content themselves"

> No, they are putting in a HUGE amount of effort crating a PLATFORM for OTHER PEOPLE to use to publish THEIR OWN content.

their PLATFORM is composed of two parts: 1) some trivial web page built using php or some existing tech which they didn't create themselves plus 2) tons of content created by their users

What exactly is the part where they're spending tons of effort? Can you do effort calculation, and give actual numbers how much effort they spent on the web page versus how much other people are doing work?

"Also I use that same link to access the page, with proper access rights."

How do you not know about browser bookmarks, let alone the way linking is meant to work? But, your dedication to illogical and inefficient methods is impressive.

"Usually the reason to reject a license is because the cost is too high"

Once again, for the hard of thinking, the cost of a CC licence or public domain content is ZERO. It's the licences you're trying to demand that would be extremely costly.

"If they don't even bother to collect money from the user of their product, they probably don't bother to pay salary to the people who created the content"

Most CC content is licensed as such by the person who made it. They are putting their own work out there voluntarily. Some of them even make a living from the work *after* applying that licence. Most public domain content is there decades after the people who made it are dead, long after they have had a chance to be paid. You are lying, yet again.

But, if you would like to provide evidence for your claims I'm all ears. My guess is that you're making shit up again to shield your own failure. You're jealous of all those open source developers who make a decent living, because your own code is of such poor quality nobody wishes to use it. Hell, 'm half guessing that the reason you hide your GitHub account is because then everyone can see you've just built your code by cribbing from public GitHub accounts.

But, evidence to the contrary for any of the above is welcome. Not random ramblings, solid evidence.

"Yes, I'm in holiday now."

For months? Lucky boy. You have a strange way of enjoying a holiday but good on you for being able to afford to do that. Some of us still have to work for a living.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

There you are denying the whole basis of how humans build great things, and that is by cooperating, borrowing and building on the works of others. Indeed, the software you use for your site, and the protocols you rely on for others to see your site are all cooperative efforts by many people.

It is a safe bet that if anybody was willing to spend the time that they would find lots of borrowings and influences from other people in your works. However you have ignored the most important borrowing from the collective efforts of many people, and that is how to layout a site so that its intent is clear, and it is easy to navigate.

Anybody who claims that they can create things without borrowing from other people, is lying narcissist, and probably not as good as they think they are.

To further poke at your ignorance, I'll note that TWO of those things were LITERALLY INVENTED BY GOOGLE! They invented two of the technologies they run on from the ground up. Where is yours, apart from that laughable set of things you run on the server you didn't build?

"2) tons of content created by their users"

Indeed. Not by them, so why do you keep trying to hold them responsible for it.

Oh, and you missed a bit:

3) a huge international infrastructure network designed, owned and operated by them, including hardware, datacenters, network backbones and all the other stuff you don't have to do, because you're paying someone else a pittance for a spot on a shared server.

"What exactly is the part where they're spending tons of effort?"

Here's some basic light reading to start with, admittedly covering the whole of Google rather than just YouTube, but they certainly do share technology and infrastructure efforts.

This is bullshit. You're just not counting all the elements where the cost is composed of.

Proper cost analysis has the following elements: 1) how the content was created? 2) who are the people who created it? 3) how the money is collected from users? 4) how the money is distributed between people who created it? 5) how much effort was spent in creating it? 6) how the effort was distributed between the creators? 7) what is the price of the product? 8) how large marketing organisation they have? 9) how widely available is the product?10) what requirements they impose on their user base?11) what technologies are being bought from outside vendors?12) how much effort they spent themselves relative to what other people did?13) is the money going to correct players in their organisation?14) how are they dealing with the green environmental issues?15) whether they are controlling subcontractors properly?16) whether they use unpaid slaves?17) how they're handling office space for employees?18) whether they have good reputation in the market?19) how high is the valuation of their stock price?

I might be forgetting some important items, but the list gives some idea how the cost analysis needs to be done.

Public domain and CC licensed content need no such thing (although some CC licences ask for "payment" in the form of attribution and/or redistribution).

"4) how the money is distributed between people who created it?"

Irrelevant due to the above.

"5) how much effort was spent in creating it?"

Completely irrelevant to its cost or value.

"6) how the effort was distributed between the creators? "

Irrelevant to the end product.

"7) what is the price of the product?"

If distributed under the public domain or certain CC licences, usually zero although there's typically nothing to stop people charging so long as the licence is adhered to.

"8) how large marketing organisation they have?"

Absolutely irrelevant, although having marketing as poor as yours affects income far more than the choice of licence.

"9) how widely available is the product?"

If it's on the internet, it's available everywhere, unless you're stupid enough to try and deliberately reduce your user base (and even then, it will still be available everywhere whether you like it or not)

"10) what requirements they impose on their user base?"

With public domain - none. With CC licences, that depends on the chosen licence.

"11) what technologies are being bought from outside vendors?"

If they are technologies not compatible with the chosen licence, they are themselves breaking the terms of that licence. If guilty of that, the fault is with the person who broke the licence, not anybody who used or distributed is without knowing that the licence was invalid

"12) how much effort they spent themselves relative to what other people did?"

Absolutely irrelevant.

"13) is the money going to correct players in their organisation?"

If money is being collected, that's an issue for internal contract agreements that are well outside the scope of the distribution licence.

"14) how are they dealing with the green environmental issues?"

What does that have to do with distribution licences. You are getting really, really desperate here.

"15) whether they are controlling subcontractors properly?"

Also a contract issue outside of the scope of distribution.

"16) whether they use unpaid slaves?"

That's an issue for law enforcement, not the people using the content.

"17) how they're handling office space for employees?"

If there are employees and offices, that's an issue for local working regulations, not the distribution.

"18) whether they have good reputation in the market?"

Sadly, irrelevant, since some of the most valuable corporations in the world are also the ones famous for screwing over employees, contractors and customers alike.

"19) how high is the valuation of their stock price?"

Now you're *really* stretching, although you are admitting again that you think only corporations should be allowed to produce content.

"I might be forgetting some important items"

Probably, you listed 19 things, and only 2 appear to be even remotely relevant. You must have something that has some relevance to the choice of distribution licence you choose?

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

> you need a detailed analysis from someone who has absolutely nothing to do with them?

Yes. If you ever used copyrighted works properly, the analysis of the effort spent in creating the product isn't too difficult. The steps how it can be done are the same as what you use to evaluate copyrighted works. Normally the effort calculation splits the product to pieces and evaluates the effort required to create that part from scratch. Summing all the efforts you get single number which contains the effort _you're_ thinking they spent in creating the product.

Now I want you to do this process. Give the number what you think the actual efforts are for each part? Numbers are the only thing that matters, and maybe how did you split the product to pieces -- i.e. what kind of elements you're seeing that takes effort to create?

Homework requests actual numbers like 33.75 or 320, but your messages do not have any of them yet.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

"Yes. If you ever used copyrighted works properly, the analysis of the effort spent in creating the product isn't too difficult."

It is if you don't have access to that information. It's irrelevant to the calculation of the price or value of the product, but I can only guess. For example, I believe that you've spent far more time this week lying about Google here than you have on creating anything. I don't know that for sure, but I have more evidence of your bullshit than I do about what's happening behind the doors at YouTube.

"Now I want you to do this process. Give the number what you think the actual efforts are for each part?"

1,321 public repositories on GitHub alone with over 2000 people working on them. Just on current stats, and just on what they've open sourced via GitHub, not including proprietary stuff they don't release there.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

> you're also not providing numbers for your claim they do nothing. provide your analysis,

a) I'm analyzing smaller part of the system, picking youtube as the item to analyze: 1) video playing engine 4 years by one person 2) web page half years of work 3) server setup -> small team several years 4) maintainance -> small team 24/7 5) dcma notices 30 persons 24/7 6) space for servers -> 2 years 7) filtering out illegal videos -> large team 24/7

b) Now if you compare these numbers to the work amount done by the user community: 1) creating youtube videos 1,000,000,000,000 hours 2) watching youtube videos 1,000,000,000,000,000 hours

It's clear that the (a) part is doing nothing compared to the (b) part. The a/b number is almost zero.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

It's clear that the (a) part is doing nothing compared to the (b) part.

You are ignoring the fact that without the a part, the b part would not exist. Providing a central, searchable repository of content, along with the comment system to allow creators and their fans to interact is a valuable service. The value of YouTube should be measured by the size of its user community, rather than the effort put into building it.

To apply the same analogy to your site, the man hours in creating the software and infrastructure that your site depends on, dwarf your efforts to produce content. Also i will repeat, the effort put into producing something does not determine its value, that is determined by how it is received by its target audience.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

> The value of YouTube should be measured by the size of its user community, rather than the effort put into building it.

I'm not counting the value of youtube.

I'm trying to count the effort that _all_ players in the market are spending for the services they provide. When the numbers start coming in, there is big surpises in the numbers, i.e. some areas of the world are very busy and cannot rest at all, while other areas don't have anything to do.

While the estimation is very inaccurate, like my numbers are completely off the mark, they still give more information than what was available before the analysis.

>I'm trying to count the effort that _all_ players in the market are spending for the services they provide.

Effort only measure hours spent doing something, it does not measure whether that effort was efficient in building a service, or whether the service built has enough use to justify that effort.

As they say round here, execution is more important than ideas or effort spent in producing something. Indeed, despite its problems, YouTube is the largest video sharing site because it has the better execution of what a video sharing site should be.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Everyone agrees"?

So, if you pull random figures out of your ass, then you can pretend YouTube aren't doing enough work? Brilliant!

"1) video playing engine 4 years by one person"

You... think that YouTube's backend was built by one person, and that development stopped after 4 years? FFS they had 65 people working there when Google bought them, and that was just over a year after they launched!

But, that confirms why you're such a bitter failure who depends on fantasy to pretend he's owed money, isn't it? Is that how long it too you to create your pathetic site?

"Effort is nice measure because it allows you to find significant problems."

Yes. For example, if you have a boss who judges you based on the number of hours sat in the office rather than your productivity, it's time to find a new boss because your current one is a moron.

Ever hear the phrase "work smarter, not harder"? It exists because, in the real world, effort means nothing if you can achieve the task at hand better with less of it. You're demanding people walk up 50 flights of stairs, while bemoaning those who use the elevator. After that climb, one set of people is going to be more productive, and it's not the idiot who made himself out of breath.

When Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the idea of "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", he wrote it in an estimated 3 days. Following his wife's reaction, he burned the original manuscript and rewrote it in around the same amount of time.

The total time writing that book over both drafts was probably around a week by all accounts. The book has never been out of print, as far I'm aware, and has had an indelible effect on culture including literature, theatre, TV, music, movies, even Bugs Bunny cartoons. You cannot say those names to most audiences, in the west at least, without them knowing exactly what you're referring to 150 years following its publication.

Our friend tp here has probably spent as much time and effort into his work both here and on his website as Stevenson did, most likely far more. He therefore wants us to believe that his work is worth more than Stevenson's

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

> > It's like the printing press but with pixels instead of ink dots.

> Thanks for proving my point that you don't understand what a web browser is or how technology works, at all!

You simply didn't understand. DISPLAY in the copyright law has very specific meaning for the newspaper pages, all the content that takes ink dots need to be counted to the copyrighted subject matter. Web browsers can do the same thing, if you count pixels instead, every pixel visible to end user need to be counted to the copyrighted subject matter, including embedding. DISPLAY in web browsers is displaying the pixels that constitute the text, images, layout, animations, 3d graphics etc.

This basically means that all ideas related to embedding not requiring licenses from copyright owners is simply bullshit.

"If I can create the pathetic site in 5 years, I can't expect that creating youtube would be anything longer."

You could educate yourself instead, and see that YouTube took 3 months from domain registration to initial beta launch. Why are basic facts and research so beyond you?

Of course, that wasn't the end of it, and over a decade of growth, development and redesign has happened to create the site you look at today, including massive global expansion, inventing new technologies and driving innovation within and without the company as a whole. Or, as you class it "doing nothing".

My approach is to try to make something similar without cloning the essential elements and checking how long it takes. While the end result is pathetic and awful, it stillgives estimate how long you can expect these things to take.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

Oh I understand just fine. I understand you are an uneducated idiot and that you still don't understand what a web browser is. At all.

If you really want to make a comparison, a web browser is more like a magnifying glass than a printing press or, gasp, a window that when you look out of it you see a bunch artists all painting or doing their own creative, artistic thing.

Again, go graduate high school before you talk about a bunch of nonsense you literally don't understand.

All that does is measure how long you take to do something, and has little relevance how long it takes other to do the same thing, especially as those people are not scared of building on the works of others when that is made available under license that permits them to do that.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

> Many a cafe or pub do display newspapers for their patrons to read, and that is perfectly legal.

Yes, but do they have some kind of extended subscription for that purpose. Making profit commercially from someone elses work usually requires professional license of the content. I dunno if newspapers provide that kind of service for cafes and pubs, or whether it is done via normal end user subscriptions.

I havent run cafe or pub so I don't know what is required from business side to setup such service for your clients.

"My approach is to try to make something similar without cloning the essential elements and checking how long it takes"

No, it's really not. Your site is nothing at all the same kind of site, other than extraordinarily superficial ones.

Perhaps you're just getting confused because all you seem to be doing is trying to come up with a bad user interface, without considering the massive amount of code and infrastructure that goes into the backend of what YouTube do.

I know that's because you're paying someone else to do that for you, despite your claims that you don't depend on anybody else, but you must be aware that the UI is not all that YouTube consists of, right?

"While the end result is pathetic and awful"

We finally agree on something!

"it still gives estimate how long you can expect these things to take."

No, it really doesn't. It shows how long a single untalented guy refusing to collaborate with anybody else or utilise previous can take to reinvent the wheel.

It doesn't explain how long talented engineers with a wealth of resources and prior knowledge behind them can take.

It certainly doesn't explain how long it would take to recreate the entirety of YouTube, with the decade of advancement that have been applied to its front and backends.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

Yes, but do they have some kind of extended subscription for that purpose.

No.

Making profit commercially from someone elses work usually requires professional license of the content.

Except they aren't make a profit on that. It's free for clients and customers to read as a convenience/amenity. If the business is paying for a subscription to it, it's actually costing them money.

It's easy, I buy a newspaper and leave it on my table for guests to read or give it to a friend. Or, it gets donated/given to me by friends/acquaintances and I leave it on my table for others to read. (note, you see this a lot in non-profit orgs, people donate newspaper and magazines to them)

Perhaps not. But, you are paying somebody to supply the network & server infrastructure to host the crappy code you write, provide security & updates for the software that they provide to enable it to be executable in the first place, the storage upon which to host your mediocre crap, and so forth.

You know, a large part of the "nothing" that you claim YouTube do is to ensure that kind of thing for its users, even if they are providing the software as well as the infrastructure.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Embeds vs. Links

Those were all "distribution right", not "display".

Not so. From the 9th Circuit case:

Conversely, the owner of a computer that does not store and serve the electronic information to a user is not displaying that information, even if such owner in-line links to or frames the electronic information.

and the 7th:

The embed code contains the video’s web address plus instructions for how to display the video. Armed with that code, myVidster creates a web page that makes the video appear to be on myVidster’s site. When you visit the site, that video and other videos appear, each in the form of a “thumbnail,” a miniature picture of a video’s opening screen shot.

Flava contends that by providing a connection to websites that contain illegal copies of its copyrighted videos, myVidster is encouraging its subscribers to circumvent Flava’s pay wall, thus reducing Flava’s income. No doubt. But unless those visitors copy the videos they are viewing on the infringers’ websites, myVidster isn’t increasing the amount of infringement. An employee of Flava who embezzled corporate funds would be doing the same thing—reducing Flava’s income—but would not be infringing Flava’s copyrights by doing so. myVidster displays names and addresses (that’s what the thumbnails are, in effect) of videos hosted elsewhere on the Internet that may or may not be copyrighted. Someone who uses one of those addresses to bypass Flava’s pay wall and watch a copyrighted video for free is no more a copyright infringer than if he had snuck into a movie theater and watched a copyrighted movie without buying a ticket. The facilitator of conduct that doesn’t infringe copyright is not a contributory infringer.

In the 7th case, they're quite plainly talking about displaying the copyrighted material (in addition to distribution) and while the judges in that case indicate that what myVidster was doing may have damaged Flava in some ways, it wasn't via copyright infringement.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

Also worth mentioning - for many years, newspapers were aware that many more people read their newspapers than bought them. IIRC, it was estimated as many as 4 to 6 more people might read a copy of the newspaper than bought one.

You know what they did as a response? Did they freak out and call everyone who read a copy without paying for one a thief, or try to sue every bar & cafe that supplied a paper to share out of business? Did they demand that the government change the law to ensure that every reader had to be tracked and fined if found to be holding someone else's copy?

No. What they did was subsidise the individual cost of the newspaper with their advertising rates. Meaning that, while the cover charge of each copy remained low, they were able to leverage greater rates from advertisers due to readership (and therefore ad target market) being far greater than the number printed. Things have changed, but this model is still workable enough that many newspapers are given out for free, and - GASP - the people who work for them still get paid!

This guy's not only wrong about the internet, he's wrong about successful business practices that probably predated his great grandparents. newspapers have, of course, slid somewhat over the years, but this is due to the major advertisers having moved elsewhere, not because coffee shops are stealing from them by allowing two people to read the same copy.

For your first round of gibberish - yeah, you'd be paying Amazon instead of Dreamhost for the hosting. You're still paying for the software and infrastructure to make your site possible. There's no difference apart from the fact that you somehow stumbled into the correct way round to do something for once.

"But getting the users is the difficult part."

Yes, and nobody will ever guarantee you those. Whether you're creating quality work or the terrible rip off you now admit you created. Far better sites than your have failed, and far worse than YouTube have thrived.

> What they did was subsidise the individual cost of the newspaper with their advertising rates.

This doesnt work in the web, since the ad revenue is going to the people who write these embed tags. His page is what user is browsing, the content is embedded in it, but the ad is at the top of the page. The original author of the content is not the one who receives the ad revenue. I.e. the adverticing revenue is going to the wrong person.

While this can be fixed by building content items that first show ad and then later shows the actual content, the embed would contain both elements. But still the page author has another ad placed on top of his page, and users will see two ad positions, with one going to the page author, and another going to the content owner.

But the real killer for this model in web is that the animated adverticements require significant investment in animation technology before they can be used. And still half of the revenue stream is going to wrong person.

since the ad revenue is going to the people who write these embed tags

Uh, no. That's not how embed tags work.

His page is what user is browsing, the content is embedded in it, but the ad is at the top of the page. The original author of the content is not the one who receives the ad revenue. I.e. the adverticing revenue is going to the wrong person.

No, that's not how advertising works. Once again you demonstrate your complete and total ignorance of how the internet and technology work.

I can put as many ads on my site as I want but I won't get paid for them unless I enter into some kind of agreement/program/partnership with the advertising company that is serving up those ads. Even then, most times I don't even get paid unless someone actually clicks on the ad and buys something from the advertised site. In which case, the original creator gets paid for his work he just sold, the advertising company gets paid for facilitating the sale, and I get paid a TINY commission for getting the user to click on the ad on my site and buy something from the creator's site.

While this can be fixed by building content items that first show ad and then later shows the actual content

This is just hilarious! How do you advertise something if you don't show, or at least reference, the actual content you are trying to advertise? Moron.

But the real killer for this model in web is that the animated adverticements require significant investment in animation technology before they can be used. And still half of the revenue stream is going to wrong person.

This is just wrong.

And once again you show that you know less than nothing about the internet and technology. Not only that, you've admitted that you absolutely FAIL at what you do. So why we should we consider you to be right when you've admitted that what you're doing isn't working and is wrong?

Maybe instead of graduating high school you should work on graduating elementary school first, as any 3rd grader could do a better job than you.

If I wanted to create quality work, what elements would be needed before it can happen? Since you've already mentioned that the current work isn't cutting it, you need to have some idea what elements are required to fix the situation?

"This doesnt work in the web, since the ad revenue is going to the people who write these embed tags"

No, it's not. It's shared between the video creator and YouTube. It could not possible work if it was going to the website owner, since you don't provide any information to YouTube in order to embed, you only copy some HTML. Unless they tie that to their account, YouTube would not know who to send money to!

"His page is what user is browsing, the content is embedded in it, but the ad is at the top of the page"

Do YouTube videos suddenly not contain ads while embedded now? When did that change?

Again, your ignorance is astounding.

"But the real killer for this model in web is that the animated adverticements require significant investment in animation technology before they can be used."

...and generally neither the hosting page nor the person who created the ad had any hand in creating that technology.

In fact, you're well aware of that, since you created none of the technology that your code runs on top of.

This was how adverticements work with youtube videos where monetizing the video will start randomly show ads to the users before they are allowed to watch the video.

Yeah but that's different than a normal website ad and doesn't have anything to do with embedding. Not to mention that Youtube has now changed how that even works. Stop moving the goal posts

actual content != ad

Oh? Then how do I know what's being advertised? The ad MUST at least reference the content and where to find it, otherwise no one would know what the ad is for. And yes, actual content == ad. Actual content is its own advertising, in addition to marketed ads.

If I wanted to create quality work, what elements would be needed before it can happen?

Borrowing those elements that work for other people, like decent user interface design, making what your site is about plainly visible on the landing page. Oh, and listen to constructive criticism.

Failure to do so may mean you are reckoned amongst the avant-guard, or more likely ignored. Also note that the avant-guard rarely made a living because their work was too strange, and were not recognized until others borrowed from what they were doing.

None of these dependencies provide the main features that my site is using, i.e. the 3d engine. This is because I created that part myself.

And guess what, without those dependencies you would have nothing. The creators of those dependencies make the freely available for others to use, with a main reason for doing so being they are dependent on other code that others make freely available. Meanwhile you build on top of them and try and lock your code away.

There's a name for this practise. It's called stealing. That's why mpaa has nice "piracy is theft" -videos available so that you'd learn this borrowing is evil practise that should be eliminated from the world.

> making what your site is about plainly visible on the landing page.

It currently shows all the thumbnails for the content on the first page.

"If I wanted to create quality work, what elements would be needed before it can happen?"

Education. Experience. Talent. All sorts of things.

What doesn't work is demanding that you get paid more than someone creating quality work because your useless ass spent longer making the inferior product.

"Or is "fixing" the problem impossible?"

The first major problem is that you have failed miserably at explaining what it's meant to be doing. The webpage doesn't explain it. You've tried various ways of stating it here, but you've gone from saying it's something innovative to essentially saying you're trying to clone YouTube with none of their tools or talent.

Define what you're trying to do first, then do it. Or, at least do a better job of explaining it on the site itself.

No, it's called "copyright infringement". Unless the content is CC licensed or public domain, in which case it's called "using with express permission of the rights owner"

"That's why mpaa has nice "piracy is theft" -videos "

...which are so totally laughable and counterproductive that they've been joked about until they finally disappeared.

"It currently shows all the thumbnails for the content on the first page."

So does Google Images after you search for something, and *they* show content relevant to what the user wants. Yours show what looks like a kid's first attempt at using 90s raytracing software, and if people wanted to view that they'd surely go for some of the far more professional examples from the time.

It was already available for over 5 years. Noone was interested. Then the ceo mentioned that it's too open. So now the source is not available. The source was always just used to bash the work instead of actually trying to use it for something useful. I left the documentation part, so anyone interested can read the source and "borrow" it to their own code, if they like the snippets. But full compilable source code is not available any longer, since it haven't proven to be useful.

Cool, so you created HTML, HTTP, Apache, Linux, PHP, TCP/IP, DNS, .png image formats, CSS and all the other things that your site depends on? All without you spending a single penny to support those who did develop them ...and that's just the list I can tell from using the dev tools in my browser when accessing the page! Who knows what else you're using if I had access to the servers and the code.

"While there are some low level features which I didn't create"

Oh, so you admit you *do* depend on things other people created! But, you won't admit it until forced to. Interesting...

The CEO of what? You weren't paid by a company to create this crap were you? If so, he was asking you to hide it because you were embarrassing your employer, not because you weren't making enough money.

There's this concept called complexity. Computer systems are full of it. Sometimes you find a pattern which you cannot yet regognize. This is where our builder tool will help. It allows you to regognize the complexity pattern which you're seeing, by visualizing the behavior of the pattern.

our software just supports 2^400 different patterns in its feature list and slightly smaller number once you restrict feature usage with their natural dependencies.

So according to you, popular libraries that are still maintained and widely used are crap, while you software which nobody seems to want is the best thing since sliced bread. It seems that your ideas of what is valuable are very different from the rest of societies.

Sliced bread has kinda lost its proprietary nature, and is now being replaced by some newer products. This is the same kind of transition what happened to the donald duck and mickey mouse, when their copyrights expired. The authors couldn't any longer keep maintaining the old system, but they needed to redesign the iconic characters and try conquer the market with fresh new concepts.

Now the iconic old stuff is no longer available and all that is left is some faint memory of how the animation characters were rendered slowly enough that even children could learn the principles of how animation works. The stuff where you change the image 60 times a second to get appearance of smooth moving characters. Now all that is gone.

The real problem is that the mickey mouse animation caused significant problems that took over 20 years to fix. You only need to look at it once at wrong time when you're young and it causes so big problems that it takes 20 years to find a fix for the problem. This kind of fix is now available, and our software can now pretty much find the problems.

> you cannot redefine copyright infringement to be "legal" simply because the owner of the copyright is offering permission to everyone.

Basically while it's possible to offer a permission to everyone, it is not necessary to accept the permission -- usually because the cost of doing so it too large. While many people think free as "free beer", there are other kinds of cost available, for example if the software was built using "unpaid slaves", then it might be bad position to take a license to it.

> When Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the idea of "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", he wrote it in an estimated 3 days.

The time spent on the writing process isn't too important compared to the fact that the poor writer had been thinking about stories and plots for his whole life. If one of the stories hits gold, he can pay off some debts accumulated while the rest of the world pirated his works.

> He therefore wants us to believe that his work is worth more than Stevenson's

Research always is risky business, as there is no guarantee that the end result will become useful. Even if you hit silver bullet, it's not guaranteed that you can make it popular enough to make any difference. All research is like this, but if you don't even try to do it, the world loses many of the innovations that make our lifes better.

Large percentage(like 98%) will not become useful, but the 2% that actually succeeds is helping millions of people even as we speak.

It's not a valid position to drop the ball and leave the responsibility to someone else.

Perhaps that's why you're so terrible at explaining what you were trying to do. You know it will take decades for you to accomplish it personally, whereas a competent coder could knock up a working prototype in a few days.

"The real problem is that the mickey mouse animation caused significant problems that took over 20 years to fix"

What's your obsession with 20 years, I wonder? Is that why you're demanding that artists get paid by the hour instead of for the value of what they create - because you know it will take you that long to create anything of value?

> Yours show what looks like a kid's first attempt at using 90s raytracing software,

You can't see the movement? Real-time graphics is very different from what raytracing software can do. Raytracing is only dealing with static images, similar to what you get from cameras, and camera images are higher quality. But if you drop the animation/movement of the scenes, then the problem becomes significantly easier. I can generate over 400 million static images, which is very low estimate.

So, yes, you wish to violate every licence available except one, but demand everyone follow that specific one without question. What a hypocritical asshole you are, especially as ALL of your work is dependent on open source software.

"it wasn't side of a bus. More like a tv screen inside the bus. But yes."

I'd love to see the ad, actually. I'm morbidly curious as to how bad it was. Unless you're as extremely gifted in whatever your native language is as you are terrible at communicating in English, I'd be willing to bet hard cash that not a single person on those buses understood the ad, let alone wanted to bring up the URL on their phone.

> Is that why you're demanding that artists get paid by the hour instead of for the value of what they create

Value? You gotta be kidding us. You havent created anything of value since you were born. But you still have some big issues with trying to steal other people's money by claiming that they never created anything of value. Seems like some kind of bullying pattern where your target gets lowered in levels first, and then all their assets is stolen and you'll laugh in the way to bank storing your stolen assets.

Are you sure you want to continue with this lowering of levels? I can go down the levels all the way to the darkest africa, while your skills will end long before that.

Basically the level tricks are not working around here. This is too much used in internet that we already have good ammunition against it.

"Value? You gotta be kidding us. You havent created anything of value since you were born"

Once again, I love the fact that you not only have to lie about me, but create a strawman version of a person you don't know. Please stop lying, especially since your work is so openly worthless.

I wrote a bash script yesterday that created more value than your shitty website ever has, and I don't consider what I do at work to be my main creative outlet.

"But you still have some big issues with trying to steal other people's money "

Please, fuck right off with your lies, you utter failure. It's not my fault you wanked away thousands on the stupidest ad campaign in history, nor does anybody owe you a penny for creating a shitty website.

Zero. It's not for sale. Although, since your idea of "value" is apparently only measured in volume of direct sales it's no wonder you fail at understanding the concepts discussed here.

I wrote it as part of my employment, to help them run their business more efficiently. Some of the software we develop is open sourced, because we recognise the value in that. We're currently expanding quite rapidly actually, partly because of the value my work creates for the business. Luckily, the developers I support are not assholes like you, and understand the value my work creates for their work.

Whereas, your worthless software failed because it creates no value for anybody, anywhere.

So your awesome bash script is worthless. Even clients don't bother paying real money for it, but instead you need to give it away for free to everyone in hope to attract some punters to it.

We understand it's difficult find your place in the world, and carve a large enough impact to the world that your being on the planet is worth it. But after your complaints about what kind of value other people around you are creating, your Zero number sounds a little bad position to take. If you truly believed that humans can be evaluated based on some bullshit value-metric, then you'd work hard to get that number to slightly higher than Zero.

Your value is Zero, but you still keep complaining that people around you are not doing anything better.

So your awesome bash script is worthless. Even clients don't bother paying real money for it

How is it worthless when he was paid to create it.

Indeed being paid to create, rather than being paid for the creations, is a viable way of earning an income as a creator, as a large number of people on YouTube have discovered. Many of those making a full time income by publishing on YouTube for anybody to view do not rely on YouTube advertising for their income, but rather on patronage by a significant number of fans.

Another interesting fact, many of those patrons are quite happy for content produced in thanks for their support to be published for free on YouTube after a short delay. Just like the Insiders here get early access to the articles for their money, but are also happy that everybody else gets free access later.

The money he got was paid because they assign a block of time some small money amount and calculate his monthly salary based on that. He was paid for spending his time, and they're just hoping that the aggregate work amount is large enough to cover his expenses plus his salary.

No, it's worth a huge amount as it automates things that would take up developers' time and frees them up to create more things for the services the company actually sells.

You are an utter moron if you think that a sale is the only value something can generate, but that's obviously why your thick skull cannot accept that YouTube provide value.

"instead you need to give it away for free"

Except, I did no such thing. I created it as part of my job, for which I am paid to run the infrastructure upon which my company operates. I get various benefits, which will include bonuses if the company performs well, which my script will help achieve. In other words, I have not only been paid for the time I took to create it, but stand to gain further if it helps to achieve the goal it was designed to contribute towards. It also adds to a portfolio of work I may be able to use on side projects, or help add value to projects which help enrich the world in ways other than adding to someone's bank account.

It's a damn shame that you only consider a direct financial transaction the only thing of any worth, but it helps explain your failure.

> No, it's worth a huge amount as it automates things that would take up developers' time and frees them up to create more things for the services the company actually sells.

Well, guess you should take a credit of what your whole company can implement and then count the aggregate work amount. I.e. how many copies your bash script helped your company to sell?

Ever since microsoft sold millions of copies of windows to pc computers, the value of copyrighted works have been measured based on how many copies the company manages to sell to customers.

This is the whole idea in copyright -- the printing press and copy-technologies allow making perfect copies of copyrighted works. This ability is just limited to the original author, i.e. exclusive right to his own works.

Thus the cloning of the work is necessary element for authors to get _value_ out of the work, since the mere text content is not valuable if it stays in author's own writing desk. Even after computers made the text content executable, these scripts can only do things inside computers, and stuff inside computers never were useful.

Like your messpage, I know. It's so not useful you can't be bothered to advertise it on more than two buses. And yet, you want me, a guy in another country, to send you money for a product I will never use, buy, or pirate for a mansion you think the government is mandated by law to provide. Fuck that.

"Ever since microsoft sold millions of copies of windows to pc computers, the value of copyrighted works have been measured based on how many copies the company manages to sell to customers."

You really are a fool, aren't you? Even if what you said was true, MS were hardly the people to come up with that, and Windows was hardly their first product to follow that model.

You apparently also have no concept of working in a team.

"Even after computers made the text content executable, these scripts can only do things inside computers"

Yes, like your crappy software depends on open source software developed by thousands of developers, most of them not directly paid for their work, before your shoddy website could execute a single line of your worthless code.

> like your crappy software depends on open source software developed by thousands of developers,

you're trying to do dependency management / following the dependencies, but obviously failing since you need take such flimsy dependencies into account...

The moon landing in 1970's probably developed half of important techniques we use today, since they were creating computer software long before any of us managed to buy our first home computers.

what about the car manufacturers who built the cars which shipped the first ibm harddisks when they were the size of a washing machines. This technology developed our storage devices, but still we're not paying anything to them for our apetite for hard disks.

Basically the dependencies go cold after few iterations, and thus the compensation for the authors need to come from the first few layers of usage for the technologies inventors are creating. This happens when the tech is still new and interesting, and has highest chance to attracting investments and interest.

Yours are still warm. You absolutely dependant on Linux, Apache, TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, HTML and many other technologies not only to have a product to fail to sell, but to leave your moronic comments here attacking the people who make the open source software your shitty product needs to be visible. Without them, you're left drooling into your own keyboard with no witnesses, which is probably the best place for you.

But, please, tell us how the people who make your life here possible are offering no value. Is it because they didn't provide a filter to automatically shut people like you out?

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Display right and embedding

It's true, PaulT. Every single copyright maximalist I've ever met is an abject failure at making money from their projects. Every. Single. Time.

There are the odd exceptions (memo to Terry Deary: you've made tons of money, mate. Stop trying to shake people down for even more copyright rents for the same things and make more funny stuff) but the ones who comment here? Failures.

Wow, so the dickhead who attacks YouTube as having no value depends on it for people to view his shitty advertisement? Hmmm...

Plus, wow that's worse than I imagined. You didn't even attempt to explain to people what the hell you were trying to sell! You spent, what, thousands on a meaningless URL and something that looked like it was ripped from a mid-80s sci fi TV movie? I bet you used open source software to create that crappy video too...

Your failure gets ever more entertaining. Not only did you refuse to use the only medium your product was accessible from to advertise it, not only did you try and sell a product that would have no value to 99.9% of the potential audience for the ad, you didn't even bother to tell them what it was!

You call rotating geometry inter-cut in with an URl an advert, without giving any infomation as to what you are advertising. I call it a total waste of money and time, as you and/or the company are not well enough known for a graphic to remind people of your existence.

I'm scratching my head wondering what the wording on the buses was. He's too damn vague in attempting to explain what he does here and on his website so I imagine the number of calls or emails he got from his bus ads was nil.

Because you're competing with hundreds of millions of competently made, interesting videos that people would rather watch first. Although, I dare say that number will now go up a bit now that you've linked it here, even if it is just people gawking to see how bad it truly is.

"when our local bus company managed to show it to over 10000 people"

...and how many of those people actually went to your site as a result, let alone stayed longer than 5 seconds before closing it?

"Obviously mighty youtube is somehow better"

Yes, they are. They give people what they actually want to watch when they want to watch it, not subject people to horrifically produced animations during their morning commute whether they want to or not.

Honestly, if I'd have seen that on the bus and I had my phone in my hand, I might have been intrigued enough by the pointlessness of it all to open the page and see if it was some kind of attempt at a viral campaign for a new retro sci-fi movie or videogame. There have been teasers for big events in the past that started with cryptic, contextless teasers.

It might have taken 10 seconds to close the page as I realised that it was in fact someone seriously trying to advertise their code website on a frigging bus, but I *may* have been tempted to give it a visit the first time!

> the number who visited as a result of the ad is dwarfed by the number of people visiting now to laugh at you.

Nope. There was actually small bit of traffic. While the traffic wasn't enough to recover the money spent on the ad, there still was alot more people visiting the site than before. And most of them were using phones to access, according to analytics data.

> ...of poor quality that nobody wants to view or utilise in any way. Bravo.

You obviously didn't understand the numbers at all. Single computer cannot set 400million*1024*1024 pixels to different colours at all because of performance reasons, even if you used fastest GPU on the planet to do the operations. The number means something different.

"While the traffic wasn't enough to recover the money spent on the ad"

So, your ad campaign failed, by any measure.

I'm curious - to use your own standard, how many sales did you make? Since that's the only metric you claimed was worth measuring my work by, how much was yours worth?

"And most of them were using phones to access, according to analytics data."

Yes, that's the pattern I'd expect from that monstrosity. Nobody's going to remember the URL and visit when they get home, so all you're going to get is curious/bored people killing 30 seconds of time to see what the hell you just showed them. That doesn't mean any of them got any more than 30 seconds of wasted time out of it.

"obviously bashing other people's work is the best respnse you can figure out?"

Why should he not? He's not the one announcing how gloriously unique and creative he is, after all, nor is he the one bashing the people who created every single thing his own work depends on. That you would be you.

"Single computer cannot set 400million*1024*1024 pixels to different colours at all"

They absolutely can. Oh.. you meant 400 million static images *per second*? Per minute? Per hour? Why didn't you state the timescale or the purpose?

You really need to start learning how to get across what this supposedly fantastic piece of shit of yours is meant to be doing. I mean, the images themselves are still worthless, but if we're meant to be marvelling at the speed rather than the images you should be telling us that.

I was talking about the multiple open source projects you use to run your website upon. Please keep up with all the people you're trying to dismiss as worthless when trying to push your useless project while remaining utterly dependant on them.

You're kidding me, right? You've constantly said that open source software is of no value if it's not paid for, that people are stupid for sharing code, that you don't have to honour their licences if you don't feel like it.

You've bashed the entirety of the concept of FOSS and attacked everybody who contributes to it. While using it every second of every day.

You have spent your entire time here arguing against the worth of anyone with a free mind and actual talent at what you fail so miserably at doing.

Something still doesn't make sense here. By the metric of trolls and naysayers, Techdirt's audience is supposed to be abysmally small. Why does this dumbfuck keep trying to engage people on a site he knows is a pitifully small number, and will never click his shit on principle? Hell, with the way he's been handling "engaging" he probably got more eyeballs on the bus!

So, you still lied, and insulted those who voluntarily give up their time and talent, not to mention also insulting the many who do get employed to contribute t open source by their employers, or who do so because they get paid in other ways.

I wonder, if you go to a soup kitchen or homeless shelter, do you also berate those because they don't pay the people who decided their work was more important than money. Possibly not. I suspect that you find it difficult to get employed with your poor quality code, and you blame the free software that people can choose instead of your poor product, rather than the simply fact that the product is so poor.

"Stallman needs a beating sometimes"

Why? For introducing concepts that make these very conversations possible?

> berate those because they don't pay the people who decided their work was more important than money.

Nope, those people get their money via filling paperwork to the government. Govt then places some conditions to the money and one of the conditions is that they provide homeless shelter or food service. This makes it possible to run the operation, while the service still staying free for the users.

I think that was a hint at the effect which the fact that the conversation has become so deeply nested that each new reply (in the deepest parts) now has one word per line has on the experience of trying to read those replies.

In the last such conversation you and tp constructed (I hesitate to say "engaged in"), that was eventually mitigated by someone doing a "reply" with the comment box at the bottom rather than clicking "reply to this" on an actual comment.

For myself, I honestly don't understand how either of you can stand to continue the conversation with that one-word-per-line effect in place, or - if you don't actually see that effect - how you avoid it. I've tried editing the page source on my end (using Firebug, with an eye towards eventually Greasemonkey) to expand the available column width to postpone the problem, without satisfactory success; the only other way I can think of to avoid the problem would be to use "flat" rather than "threaded" comment-display mode, which would make sustaining a meaningful conversation - especially one with as many branches as this one has - even harder.

(That lack of understanding or of successfully devising a workaround doesn't seem to stop me from reading it, though what that may say about me is an unresolved question.)

"For myself, I honestly don't understand how either of you can stand to continue the conversation with that one-word-per-line effect in place, or - if you don't actually see that effect - how you avoid it"

It only happens in threaded view, change by view by time to see the laster posts unthreaded. It's a known issue here for a while, hopefully one of the guys is going to fix it in some way at some point.

Also, I only respond when I see something pop up in my email, I don't tend to just go browsing through prior threads. So, I don't see it as threaded to begin with, I'm replying to the nonsense I just read in my inbox.

So, you're so fucking stupid that you think that FOSS are homeless people now? They can't possibly be professionals who devote time and energy to side projects? They can't possibly be people who run businesses that don't depend on selling software as an end product, and have opted open source their software to collaborate with other professionals?. They have to be living on welfare?

> So does that mean we finally broke you and you're run out of things to say

It means the techdirt's user interface sucks more than I expected. If you can accidentally press submit without any chance of fixing the mistake, and it eats all the nice argumentation in the process, obviously the user interface flower should be fixed asap.